Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

The evening began with small talk, which I was unaccustomed to and for which I had no talent. When I realized I had to say nothing, only to smile and nod from time to time, I was relieved. When we sat at the table — after standing for some time in the entryway, the two of us holding our plastic cups of brandy, while to my left lay a parlor, darkened and unused — he began to talk instead of his work. You would think, would you not, that in the more than two hours I listened to Smythe speak of his work I would learn something interesting, or that he would say something thoughtful, or at the very least provocative? But this was not to happen. He had the ability to talk at length on interesting subjects while somehow rendering them not only intensely uninteresting but completely opaque. “Sir,” I’d interject as Smythe cut eagerly into his fowl — he ate the entire meal with vigor and apparent satisfaction, but failed to notice that I had left most of mine untouched—“will you tell me a little about your research into viral mutation?” This was, after all, the basis of his entire theory, his life’s work. But he did not want to speak of his research; instead he spoke of the people who had impeded it. There was the dean, and the associate dean, and this colleague and that — he listed dozens of names, detailing to me what each had done and how now they had been humbled and made to look at him anew. The dean, he had heard, had rolled his eyes upon hearing about the Time magazine story. The associate dean had initially refused to give him the space he had wanted in Chase Hall, had tried to shunt him into a darker, inferior, smaller lab on the fifth floor. But he had prevailed, hadn’t he? He was without rancor, even jolly, as he told me these stories, onion-and-leek soup dripping from his spoon. He was not interested in discussing science. Still talking, he excused himself to the kitchen and came back with more soup, this time a blend of the two, which he swirled together with the handle of his spoon until it achieved a strange pasty consistency, and then he tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt to protect his tie. He held it flat against his shirt with one hand and spooned up the soup with the other, murmuring his appreciation.

Watching him, I wondered what the Turks would think of this display or if perhaps they already knew what Smythe was truly like, and if so, why did they remain with him, and how could they respect him? Had I underestimated the limits of their tolerance? Or was this an act that Smythe was performing only for me? Were the Turks and the junior residents crouched in the darkened parlor, their faces tight with held-back laughter, watching this bit of theater in which I was an unknowing and unwilling participant? Was this even Smythe’s house? Where was his wife — I knew he had one, and on his left ring finger he wore a thin golden circle — and wasn’t there something unnaturally still about these rooms? I kept thinking that if only I could find a reason to walk through the doors into the kitchen or cross the foyer into the living room, I would find the real house, one in which Smythe held forth articulately and behaved like the Great Man we all thought he was, and his pretty wife would serve a good meal, and his life would make sense to me and I would cease to feel like such an anthropologist in my own town, with the man who had hired me and invited me to dinner at his house.

After we had drunk our sherry, he was silent for a moment, and I was able to speak at last. “Sir,” I asked, “why did you hire me?”

“Ah,” he said, after a silence. “Why indeed.” He sighed and spun his glass in his fingers, and the reflections it made moved across his face like firefly light. “You are not a good student — you are dreamy and arrogant. Your professors find you ungovernable.” He said this all cheerfully, in the same pleasant tone in which he had recounted his enemies’ many failed plots against him. “But when they told me about you”—and here he turned and looked at me, and I could see for the first time his eyes, the pleats of skin that hung beneath them, his scleras as pink as those of the mice whose organs I harvested and shaved through sieves every day—“I suppose I remembered myself when I was your age. How desperately I wanted to escape, how little I felt I belonged, how much I craved my freedom, how much I craved my fame. We are alike, the two of us.”

“I’m not like that,” I wanted to say, but I said nothing. He was drunk, I could now see. How long had he been like this? Had he been drunk when I first came in? I felt suddenly foolish, and childish, and embarrassed for myself. Why could I not see what was before me? What was the trick to understanding people that I alone seemed unable to possess? As I thought, Smythe was making strange noises, small gulping sounds. I thought he was choking, but when I hurried to him, I realized he was crying, his chin flat against the napkin still tucked into his shirt, his hands folded in his lap like a child’s. “Oh god,” he said. “Oh god.” I did not know what to do. My coat was on the chair next to me, where Smythe had placed it. I picked it up and fled.

The following Monday I did not go into the lab. I did not go to any of my classes. Instead I stayed home and read, or looked at my atlas and made lists of places I wanted to see. I thought occasionally of what Smythe had said to me and decided he was wrong. I thought of him crying and felt pity for myself and disgust for him. For meals, I made my favorite snack, hot oatmeal into which I stirred raw eggs, until I realized that it was the sort of strange concoction Smythe might serve. I was terrified that I might become him, although it was not until some years later — about the time, in fact, I discovered what a persimmon should truly taste like — that I was able to define why: that worse than his poor science, the flimsy scholarship, was his small, inexplicable life alone in that strange house, with no one around to distract him from the meagerness of his own existence. It startled me to learn this about myself, that I had such petty, poor fears, that I had come to think in such trite and soft ways.

After a few days of my moping, the medical school secretary called, asking snippily if I was planning on returning to classes, followed by Brassard, who told me in his sniffing way that I had potentially ruined Parton’s experiment and oughtn’t bother returning. When I hung up, I was relieved, for in the space of my dinner with Smythe the lab had come to seem a sort of trap, a sort of place where I would become like him, holding my theory tightly to me, idealess, terrified of the inevitable day when I would be proved an imposter. Or at least this is what I told myself I feared. Now I had been not just released but told I was inappropriate, that I would never become one of them, and their words, their dismissal, left me shaky with joy. I was safe, I thought, and for some time, for a long time, I was.

The next day I returned to my classes. My professors — some of whom were quite close to the Turks — seemed to have heard that I was no longer with Smythe’s lab and, surprisingly, treated me better than they had before, although I was still nobody exceptional. But I was careful not to feel resentful about this, as I might have before. I thought of Smythe—“But now they’re coming back to me, now they’re giving me what I want”—and cringed. For the next year I attended classes and sat silently in the lecture halls, determined not to make myself into something more significant than I really was. It was my first lesson in humility, in the lab or in life. 16

III.

One of the attractions of medical school for the unimaginative (or, if I am to be more charitable, to the less dreamily inclined) is certainly the lack of choices it offers. Of course, a doctor, whether he works with patients or alone, with tissues, must make dozens of decisions within a given day, but the larger questions — the ones about what you must do next in life — are answered for you. Indeed, you need never think about what the next year will bring, because for many years the path is laid before you, and it is only your duty to follow it. College leads to medical school, which leads to internships and residencies, which leads perhaps to fellowships, then to an appointment or a private practice or a job in a hospital or a group. It is this way now, and it was this way when I was in school as well.